You’ve just had a beautiful website built by Cariad Web Design and now you want to show it off, right? Well this is where keywords come into play.
Firstly, what are keywords?
Keywords are essentially the terms your potential customers are searching for in Google and other search engines. Let us use the example that you have a coffee shop business in a small town called Rochester. Your primary goal is to be found by anyone looking for a place to drink coffee in your town.
How to get started with keywords
The best starting point would be to ask yourself a series of questions:
- Who are your customers and what are they looking for?
- What sort of words do they use?
- What questions do they tend to ask?
- How many people are searching for those words or terms?
- Where are your customers located? Are they local, around the country or even international?
Discovering more keywords
You probably have some keywords in mind that you would like to rank for, this is what we call “seed keywords”. We can now leverage the data from keyword search tools such as Google Search Consoleor Google Keyword Planner. This will enable us to learn more about how many people are searching for these terms every month and other relevant keywords that have potential, that you may have not thought of for yourself.
Let’s use the example keyword ‘Chocolate’ – Other relevant keywords could be ‘Belgian chocolate’ ‘white chocolate’ and ‘chocolate bar’.
How often are these terms searched for?
Even though each keyword variation is similar, they should be treated very differently. What you may notice is the amount of times each keyword is searched can vary massively. Here it is important you don’t just look at the search volumes, it’s important to also check the keyword difficulty. This is how hard it is for your website to rank for that specific keyword.
As much as it would be amazing to rank at the top of Google for the keyword ‘coffee’ it is very unlikely, however ranking for the keyword ‘Colombian medium roast coffee’ could be a lot easier.
The power of ‘longtail keywords’
This is where you put your SEO strategy hat on. The keyword ‘coffee’ may have the highest search volume. However the intent behind that person’s search is very broad. Think about what the searcher is trying to achieve. Someone searching the keyword ‘coffee’ may just need an image of a cup of coffee or they may be looking into how instant coffee is made etc.
Conversely, if we use a range of longtail keywords such as ‘vegan belgian dark chocolate’, the search volume will be lower because the intent is much more specific. Do not underestimate the power of intent over the volume of searches.
By now you have probably come to the conclusion that keywords are super important to your website’s SEO performance. The key pointers to your keyword selection should be your ability to find a balance between how many times a keyword is searched and the difficulty to compete for a favourable position in Google. This is where your keyword strategy comes into play and you can begin to explore the power of longtail keywords. If you look hard enough you may find a longtail keyword that has a high search volume with a low ranking difficulty. Congratulations you’re onto a winner!
